Youth Values and Transitions: longitudinal insights
Janet Holland
Youth Values and Transitions: longitudinal insights
Today I will
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describe the study at the core of my thinking on the subject
talk about youth values, particularly in the context of youth and childhood
studies
changing context of youth transitions
introduce the theories that have guided the research
methods, talk a little about qualitative longitudinal research (QLR)
theories we have generated from the study
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case study of one young woman to illustrate all the issues I have raised.
Youth Values and Transitions: longitudinal insights
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shifted from values, to adulthood, to social capital
agency and the ‘reflexive project of self’
values and the construction of adult identity
how the social and material environment in which young
people grow to adulthood acts to shape the values and
identities that they adopt
Youth Values and Transitions: longitudinal insights
• Youth Values, we used questionnaires to 1800 young people
across the five sites, followed by focus groups (56) and individual
interviews (54), with volunteers from the questionnaire sample
• The sites are: a leafy commuter town (largely middle class and
white; an inner city site (working class and ethnically diverse); a
disadvantaged estate in the North West of England (working
class and white); an isolated rural area (mixed social class professionals, rural labourers, farmers) and a city in Northern
Ireland (communities mixed re social class and religion)
• who and what formed the basis of their value systems, whom did
they respect, and what kind of adults did they aspire to be?
Youth Values and Transitions: longitudinal insights
• Inventing Adulthoods, dedicated biographical approach
with 118 young people across the sites
• repeat biographical interviews, memory books and
lifelines
• Youth Transitions. We continue the biographical
interviews focusing on families, communities and social
capital as part of a large programme of research with
the Families and Social Capital ESRC Research Group.
Youth Values and Transitions: longitudinal insights
• cross-cut analysis, we use computer aided analysis of
all of the cases at one particular point in time, a
synchronic analysis.
• narrative analysis, we take account of individual
biographical narratives through time, a diachronic
analysis
Inventing Adulthoods
1996 - 1999
Youth values: Identity, diversity
and social change
Questionnaire n=1800
Focus Groups n= 56
1:1 interviews n= 53
1999 - 2002
Inventing adulthoods: Young
people’s strategies for transition.
Three in-depth 1:1
biographical interviews at
9 monthly intervals n=301
Timelines, memory books
2002 - 2006
Youth transitions
Two in-depth interviews,
18 months apart
2004
QLS Feasibility Study
2005-2006
Making the long view: Archiving,
representing and sharing a QL
resource
Peer consultation,
questionnaires, meetings
Constructing an archive of
Inventing Adulthoods
Discussion of youth values
"The young people of today love luxury. They have bad manners,
they scoff at authority and lack respect for their elders. Children
nowadays are real tyrants....they contradict their parents, ... eat
gluttonously and tyrannise their teachers."
‘Public understanding of young people’s lives is in terms of the
spectacular – drug and/or alcohol-crazed, violent or criminal
(more often than not all three), as obese, molly-coddled stay-athomes, or as idlers who want to be famous without doing a day’s
work’ (Henderson et al. 2006).
Youth Values
"the link between deprivation and juvenile crime, an
interest in the distinctive forms of juvenile youth culture,
the gang, the deviant subculture. Youth becomes boys,
the wild boys, the male working class adolescent out for
blood and giggles: youth-as-trouble, youth-in-trouble"
(Hebdige, 1982).
Youth Values
Yeah and how do you think adults see young people?
Belinda: As pests (laughs and so does the interviewer).
Belinda: As a nuisance. I think the older people, they do. And the other - it's like on
my estate, the ones that are a bit older than us, they were all tearaways, they were
all a lot of trouble. So everyone looked at them as scum and, you know, just they
walked past and you'd think, ‘There goes trouble,’ or something like that. And
(pause) not so much me because I knew the backgrounds they come from. And
although they were on drugs and they were doing things, it was because they
never had no guidance from their parents, they never had the love and things that I
had, so they went down that road, 'cos they never had no one to show them the
right way to go. So in a way it wasn't their fault, it was - they'd done what they had
to do, sort of thing. And alright, they got mixed up with the wrong crowd but they
had nowhere else to turn to.
Youth Values
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theories of moral development (Piaget 1965/1931; Kohlberg 1981-1984) and
feminist critiques of these theories emphasising relationship and
connectedness in processes of moral development (Gilligan 1982, Tronto
1993).
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the new sociology of childhood perspective, which sees children and young
people as active in the construction of their own identity and world.
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theories of post- and high modernity, which suggest that this construction of
self is taking place in a changing world epitomised by risk, uncertainty and the
crumbling of traditional institutional supports
Youth Values
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They saw acquiring moral autonomy as closely aligned with the development
of physical and emotional competence
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Polly: You’re responsible because you did it (laughs). I mean, if you knew how
to do it then you must know how to take responsibility for it – you must be able
to ‘cos you knew how to do it – knew how to do the thing that was wrong [yw
16]
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Carol: Maybe they weren’t raised with the morals you know. But everybody
knows, you’re brought up in society that you can’t kill, it’s not just young
people…. But I dunno. Maybe they came from a broken home or something,
but it’s still no excuse. (yw, 16)
Changing contexts changing transitions
Economic insecurity and risk are now imagined to be best
addressed through individual resiliency and a capacity to change
and adapt to a volatile educational and labour market.
Individuals need to be prepared to return to education to re-skill
themselves, to negotiate wages and conditions through private
arrangements, to change career paths when necessary, to
manage livelihoods without a ‘job for life’, and to take personal
responsibility for their economic security. (Aapola et al. 2005:59)
Changing contexts changing transitions
• more extended: with economic independence deferred
• more complex: there is no longer a conventional timetable,
dependence and independence may combine and critical
moments make a difference
• more ‘risky’: involving backtracking, risk taking and
parent/child conflict
• more individualised: young people have more choice but
are not equally able to capitalise on it
• more polarised: with inequalities more sharply defined in
relation to more elite ‘slow track’ transitions and more risky
‘fast track’ (Jones 2005)
Late modernity and the risk society
Giddens and Beck both
• regard late modern society to be a risk society with high levels of insecurity and
uncertainty, but providing new choices and opportunities, and access to new and
multiple information sources.
• see the changing balance of power between men and women and a redefinition of
the relationship between men and women as significant in the processes of
change in late modernity
• see the couple relationship as becoming more significant in these shifting sands
• For Giddens (1992), it is the pure relationship, between equals, lasts for as long as
it works for them.
• For Beck (1992) it is the loss of other meaningful relationships that can lead to
considerable weight being placed on the couple, which may not be able to meet
the relational needs of the individual.
‘normal’ and ‘choice’ biographies
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Du Bois Reymond describes a ‘gender specific normal biography’ where
young people ‘aim for a clearly defined profession and employment at an early
stage and enter fixed relationships in order to start a family – or at least they
intend to’ (1998:66). She contrasts this with a ‘non-gender specific choice
biography’.
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When structural forces and personal resources, such as gender and social
class, support one another, there is a tendency for the structural resources to
take on an ‘invisible’ quality’ (Nilsen and Brannen 2002: 42).
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Walkerdine and her colleagues have another take on the continuing
importance of social class, suggesting that the choice biography should also
be understood in terms of self regulation, where ‘the most seductive aspect of
self invention of all lies in the possibility of the working class remaking itself as
middle class’ (2001: 121).
reworking the category class
Class retrieved in a culturalist analysis
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a shift in how class operates, and that ‘in various settings of social life,
processes of inequality are produced and reproduced routinely and […] this
involves both economic and cultural practices’ (Devine and Savage 2000:
196).
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‘while collective class identities are indeed weak, people continue to define
their own individual identities in ways which inevitably involve relational
comparisons with members of various social classes’, so that class cultures
are being reformed ‘around individualised axes’ (Savage 2000:xxii).
reworking the category class
Class retrieved in a cultural and psychosocial analysis
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‘class is produced in a complex dynamic between classes, with each class
being the other’s ‘Other’’ (2005: 923). Emotional and psychic dimensions need
to be taken into account, a psychic economy of social class (Reay, 2005:911).
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The production of subjects from all classes and the way in which they live their
subjectification centrally involves a constant invitation to consume, to invent, to
choose, and yet even in the midst of their choice and their consumption class
is performed, written all over their every choice. …And…the living out of these
marks of difference is filled with desire, longing, anxiety, pain, defence. Class
is at once profoundly social and profoundly emotional and lived in its specificity
in particular cultural and geographical locations. (Walkerdine et al. 2001)
reworking the category class
Class deployed as a legitimising category in the hands of the dominant
Representation of the working class by the dominant:
• …as underclass, as white blockage to modernity and global prosperity, as
irresponsible selves to blame for structural inequality, … as lacking in agency
and culture, whilst the middle-classes are represented as at the vanguard of
the modern, as a national identity and cultural resource ( Skeggs 2004: 94)
• Walkerdine (1996) argues that that traditional sociological understandings of
class in terms of occupational or economic status, also serve to reinforce
dominant discourses around mobility and merit.
• Gillies suggests that theories of the reflexive, late modern agent have
permeated the social landscape, generating a new language to explain
personal experience and social relationships, and shaping governing politics in
the UK. They bring a stated aim of redistributing possibilities as opposed to
wealth. (Italics added, 2005: 837).
New economy
• changes leading to the ‘new economy’ include deindustrialisation, an increase in the service sector in the
economy, and flexibilisation
• Employees need to be sufficiently flexible, technically equipped
and well trained to be able to adapt throughout their professional
life to different tasks, contexts and requirements (Castells
2000).
• It is argued that this ‘new economy’ is becoming increasingly
more virtual, reflexive, flexible and networked.
• ‘economic postmodernisation’ has led to the new economy being
characterised by data, knowledge and service intensity (Hardt
1999, Castells 1996, Thrift 1998, Lury 2003, Adkins 2005a.).
New economy
• erosion of the distinction between the public and the private
spheres. A contributory feature is increasing female participation
in the labour market, which has led to the inclusion in the public
world of work of attributes and activities that were previously
considered to be part of the private sphere, and the reverse.
• In the new globalised economy, what elite workers exchange on
the employment market is based on gender, identity work and
reflexivity. Reflexivity is the ability to reflect upon and change
one’s practice as appropriate.
New economy, remaking of class, race and gender
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not all reflexive identities are seen as equally valuable or desirable and old
forms of inequality such as class, gender and race are being remade in new
ways. For Skeggs it is only the white middle classes who are assumed to
‘have’ a self that can become a project, and ‘reflexivity’ – a self conscious
conversation of self with self, has more or less value according to who
performs it Skeggs (2004)
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in the new economy the accumulation of information replaces the
accumulation of capital, with a reworking of power and property as largely
informational (Adkins 2005a). Axes of difference are reworked in relation to
access to and exclusion from information flows, with implications relating to
class, gender and race (Adkins 2005b).
new sociology of work to explain the new economy
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there are blurred and shifting boundaries between different forms of work:
public and private, paid and unpaid, formal and informal;
work is embedded in other social relations;
orientations to work are shaped by gender, class and culture;
it is increasingly important to understand work on the margins of public spaces
(Taylor et al. 2003).
Glucksman (2003) adds to this conceptualisation, stressing the significance of
connections between different work activities
interconnections between work activities across the economic processes of
production, distribution, exchange and consumption.
connectedness between work activities in different spheres, and crucially how
boundaries between what is work and what is not can change
An interjection on method: qualitative longitudinal
investigation
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At the core are the principles of qualitative investigation in general, an interest
in understanding the meaning of the experiences of social actors in their social
context, both for the actors, and through an analytic and interpretative process
for the researcher.
Qualitative research can produce high quality, in-depth data, and great
explanatory value. It can offer an understanding of causality, how and why
things happen as they do, how aspects of social, cultural and contextual
processes interact to produce different individual outcomes (Thomson,
Henderson and Holland 2003).
Qualitative research generates theory, although it can also be used to
investigate hypotheses
Qualitative longitudinal research brings the additional dimension of time,
process and change to the centre of the research process and knowledge
generated
The method raises many issues: handling the vast amount of data generated;
lack of closure - interpretations can always be disrupted by the next round of
data; ethics; confidentiality; continuity of personnel and teams
Theories we generate
Critical moments
we used the term ‘critical moments’ to describe events in young
people’s lives that either they or we the researchers or perhaps
both, considered to be highly consequential.
The approach draws attention to the importance of timing, the
configuration of events, and the resources and resourcefulness
of young people’s responses to these events
Theories we generate
examples of critical moments
family related situations, moving (house, school, town, country);
illness and bereavement; events associated with the education
system both formal (exams, changing schools) and informal
(bullying, relationship with teachers).
Rites of passage identified included ‘coming out’ as lesbian or gay,
passing a driving test and discovering or rediscovering religion.
Relationships were an enduring source of critical moments
leisure
relationship
domestic
self
citizenship
work
education
A case study: Maisie
Int: Well do you think you've got more networks than people you know?
Maisie: I think it's just because I've got so many jobs, and I've had so many jobs,
you know. (Int: Yeah.)
Maisie: Because I've got friends at (sports club where she works part-time), I've
got friends at my new job, I've got friends that I know from the (hotel where
she worked), I've got friends from College, from school, from uni - I don't know,
it's just like a bit (.) All these like little groups.
Int: Yeah but the ones that you spend the most time with are
the ones at uni?
Maisie: Yeah because I'm there at university. But people have always said to me,
"When you go to university you'll meet friends who will be your friends for your
life," and they probably are true.
A case study: Maisie
Maisie: Well I'm like independent and everything 'cos I don’t really
need them. But I think I have to do a lot, and I just think - not
that I moan about having to do these things - but I just think that
when I look at some of the other girls at uni and they just seem to
like just can just do what they want. And before I can just do
what I want in the day I have to like make sure that everybody
else is OK. Like with my Mum being ill in hospital, that's been
hard because - and like shop - things like you have to do the
shopping and just pay the bills, you know, just simple things like
that, but it takes up….
And like I just feel it's just hard that, trying to fit everything in.
A case study: Maisie
Maisie: I think like going to university I think has like made me grow
up. 'Cos like you've just got up and you're in like a different
environment and stuff, aren't you? And meeting new people has
like made me grown up. And like my Mum being ill makes you a
bit more independent - but I think I was always like independent
anyway, like looking after myself.
Int: Would you say there's any particular moment in time, or any
particular sort of thing that happened?
Maisie: Yeah I think breaking up with him, like when we parted, was
like made me change a lot. 'Cos when he broke up - when we
broke up I just felt like that was it. I've gotta get back on - like go
out and get myself a job and like start seeing all my friends again
A case study: Maisie
Maisie: … and what she was saying to me, where it was like
seemed quite good like, was it being a 24 hour company, I could
like - I wouldn't mind like going to uni, coming home at like half
six/seven and like starting at (retail outlet) at like eleven o'clock
at night… . Or like - or even coming home for a sleep and have
some tea, start at eleven o'clock at night and working till seven in
the morning. Then I could go home and have a few hours' sleep
and I've got all day to do my uni work. Or I could do like a six two, and I'd still have all day to do my uni work. Because even
when I'm not in uni I get up at six anyway, because you know
when you just do? I don’t really mind not sleeping at all.
A case study: Maisie
Int: Yeah so it's only the rich kids who can afford to go to hall at (her
university)?
Maisie: I think in all universities.
Int: Yeah.
Maisie: But some people - not everyone - but you have to really
struggle. And it's a shame because it's like they make it so hard
for you to go.
Int: Yeah.
Maisie: Really hard, and I just really think - but I don’t think normal
people are supposed to go to university, the way they work it out.
A case study: Maisie
Maisie: And I do wish that I had more money and that my Mum and
Dad was rich, 'cos then I wouldn't have to actually go to work,
you know, to get money. Well I would, but I wouldn't have to go
to work as much would I?
Maisie: Not - not like I don’t hate like my family or like living at
home, but I just hate this hole. I've always said - well I always
say now that I wanna go to university and everything and like get
a job, but when I get a job I'll never live in (estate) ever, 'cos I just
think it's a bad place to live, I think it's full of idiots.
A case study: Maisie
It is not what she wants:
Maisie: But then I just laugh because that is what I just don’t want in my life. I will
- when I'm the one that's got a nice job with like loads of money and a nice car
and don’t live round here, I'll be the happy one won't I, not them little scallies
on the dole? (laughs) … And like I'm not saying that it's that bad around here.
But I don’t know if you understand what I mean, it's just like I just don’t want
that, I just really don’t want that. And it's just not anything that I'd ever want.
And what she does want:
Maisie: And I really would like to go to university, have a bit of fun when I leave,
go away working, but at the end of the day when I grow up I want to have like
a nice job, you know, and have a nice house and like a nice family with
children and a husband and a nice car and like, you know, just to have a nice
life.